MOE: I guess we have to talk about campaign finance today. But first I'd like to draw the readers' attention to this handy guide to why you can't really blame the war for the crap economy, despite what Stiglitz says, and even Stiglitz says the war has only added like $5 or $10 to the price of oil, but basically the point is that every globalization has its discontents and our objectivist malcontents didn't pay attention to that when they were setting policy so now we have more discontents over here while some folks in India and China are starting to enjoy better lives/deeper carbon footprints. ANYHOW
MEGAN: Prosperity brings global warming hooray! But only the rich can afford to reduce their carbon footprints. And I always find it difficult to believe that people really think that the war brings the bad economy when war generally makes the economy better. It was one of the reasons Hitler and WWII were initially so popular in Germany — taking shit over improved the economy almost immediately. War spending did its part for ending the Great Depression, etc.

MOE: Well yeah but as Stiglitz pointed out in 2003 Iraq was hardly "total war" and the economic benefits were thus hardly going to be evenly spread around. And as this report points out tax cuts, airline bailouts and No Child Left Behind played their early part in deficit spending. Oh man there are really cute dogs on my Fox News right now. Oh how sweet and all their owners have swaddled them in American flags and "freedom"-themed accessories!
MEGAN: Do they have freedom-themed leashes?

MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, while Bush was cutting taxes he was also presiding over the largest expansion in government history. I was at a speech by Andy Card in 2005, I think, and he went through all these verbal gymnastics to deny that the Administration had expanded the government which made the ambassador from an unnamed country next to whom I was seated marvel at his stones. It basically required that he exempt from consideration the Defense Department or DHS, which are (naturally) where all the increases have been, so it was absurdist in its brilliance. Sort of like if you don't want to be quoted, just curse every other word.
MOE: Hey, speaking of the defense budget is Israel trying to save us some money by just bombing Iran for us? Because that's awfully generous, considering all those fears we are about to elect that Muslim Marxist guy to lead the country and who knows what that means for the Jews…
MEGAN: Well, I mean, we are a leetle busy right now, I think we thought we'd be done enough in Iraq (the same way we're, like, totally Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan) that we could've started bombing Iran on our own.

MEGAN: Anyway, so, campaign finance?
MOE: Oh right, that's not my issue. And I must admit, I was occupied with this crazy Botox bandit story…and also vaguely transfixed by some story they're running on Fox now about some woman who lit up on an airplane, and in her mugshot she just looks kind of drunk or high so it kind of makes sense that she would do that, especially with fares so high these days you'd think you could do whatever you damn well please — ha! On my Virgin flight they wouldn't even let me use the blanket during takeoff, which was insane — and anyway, oh yes, Obama. We should talk about this. I guess it's disappointing but not surprising? I dunno

MEGAN: Well, but they all opted out of public financing for the primary and there were rumors McCain was going to for the general. Plus, I mean, it restricts him to $85 million which is maybe one of the reasons that, you know, Democrats don't go to states they "can't" win and ditto with Republicans and so everyone fights for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida and concedes the others to one another.

MOE: I will say that even if it is blatantly hypocritical it also appeals to that side that worries about his ability to play dirty/be pragmatic/blahblah. Which seemed to be a big concern of Clintonites.
MEGAN: Oh, sure. I mean, I think the real issue is that 99% of Americans probably don't know anything about the public financing system so they whole OH MY GOD WHAT HAS HE DONE thing is probably right over their heads.
MEGAN: Which is why it's smart, release the video, let the talking heads pontificate for 24 hours just before the weekend, then release a new ad and start airing it in red states and let them think about that.

MEGAN: But, also, I think he makes an interesting point. Public financing comes from the $3 check-off on your tax return, so it's like small donations from small people funneled through the government. He's got 1.5 million donors, half of which are small-amount donors. He's practically creating his own public financing system, it's just one in which there are no limits on what he can spend after the convention.
MEGAN: Which is an interesting thing, actually. The party that has the Presidency gets the last convention, which means that the party without it gets a week or more where they are hamstrung by the public financing limits and hte incumbent party is not. In 2004, it was a full two weeks because the Dems went before the Olympics, then the Olympics and then the Republicans went and Bush became subject to the spending limits.
MOE: Hey check this out we're using one percent less gas than last year! And this is unrelated but here's a pleasant photo of a highway in Beijing, where starting July 20 they will also be using less gas, for obvious reasons. Okay, now I'm headed to Peggy and Brooks. Krauthammer and Krugman both wrote today about McCain's offshore drilling blah blah, one of them is for it and one of them is against it I'll let you guess who!

MEGAN: Gosh, so hard! Also, by the way, the DC metro system had 2 top-10 ridership days this week alone, and they're blaming it on gas prices.
MOE: David Brooks likens Obama to Mr. Rogers playing Ari on Entourage. (Would that be good for the Jews?) Anyway, he proceeds to do exactly the thing I was talking about where Obama actually gets praised for "selling out" in a move that should disappoint his starry-eyed media fans but actually makes them cream their pants because they are ashamed of their idealism and also, masochists:

MOE:

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

MEGAN: I think it's funny that Clinton supporters either think he's the worst of the Chicago political machine or a naive waif and never anything in between.
MOE: Although uh Noonan isn't feeling the sentimentality shame so much today:

In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day it doesn't. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn't, not really. The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better.

MEGAN: Yeah, she was on Scarborough this morning and they all got maudlin about Tim Russert.
MOE:

That's what we talk about in eulogies, because that's what's important. We don't say, "The thing about Joe was he was rich."

MEGAN: Also, her site is down.

MEGAN: Off-topic, our friend Calderone has the story of the wacky Hardball ad about Michelle's supposed make over and an even funnier fake one for Cindy McCain.
MEGAN: I also think the whole thing is funny, like Michelle needs a fashion makeover? The figures aren't dancing ladies in the Obama ad as much as fake runway models
MOE: I hate sentences like that. How many eulogies have any sort of basis in the reality of someone's life? I went to a very rich guy's funeral once. All the eulogies were like "great guy worked hard loved the outdoors cared about his family" and meanwhile half the family is sitting there seething over what a cold unemotional terror he'd been. But yeah, I dunno. Anyway I failed to mention that the Bush Administration's spying on Americans thing may, like the shitty economy and the shady no-bid multibillion dollar overbudget defense contracts and chaos/anarchy/fear in Iraq, get to outlive the Administration.

MEGAN: I also love that the Dems rolled over on retroactive immunity for telecoms as part of it, giving just enough judicial oversight to make it look like there will be some if we aren't paying attention, but little enough that it will make any difference to the telecoms.

• Hillary suffered a coughing fit in South Dakota today and might give up altogether tomorrow. I have been suffering coughing fits all weekend and I haven't even managed to give up smoking, so I'm not placing any bets, but apparently there's a deal in the works for the Obama campaign to Bernanke her Bear Stearns. [Huff Po]
• Speaking! Krugman defends Bernanke on the grounds that there are no unions in America sending inflation spiraling of control with their wage demands like there were in the seventies. But hello Paul, you know what the Chinese were making in the seventies? [NYT]
• Also, I bet Americans had slightly less than a trillion dollars in credit card debt in the seventies. [WSJ]
• Stuff we did have in the seventies besides unions: regulations and trade barriers. Without those things to eradicate economic growth may be so hard to achieve that Barack Obama can call himself the "growth candidate" with his proposals to focus on preschool. [Wash Post]

• Ahmadinejad said something about how Jesus will come back and kill all the Jews this time. [Breitbart]
• Sadr City: 110 degrees, lacking potable water or a decent sewage system, but — your boss will be so stoked! — there's totally decent BlackBerry service! [WSJ]
• "I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do we find such men? For the job of swabbing out the White House stables, yes. But for any task involving the weighing of words?" Hitch suggests you forego Scott McClellan's tell-all in favor of Doug Feith's epic defense of Don Rumsfeld, on account of a bunch of bullshit retorts to straw arguments no one seriously makes — "that there was no consideration given to postwar planning," for instance; oh please — and also, Feith's superior prose style. Natch. [Slate]
• Can "parenting classes" save the next generation of inbred underage incest victims from the clutches of Fundamentalist Mormon mind control? Well… [AP]
• Ted Kennedy's brain surgery was successful. Now comes the fun part: radiation and chemo. Good luck.[WSJ]
• Matt Drudge as microcosm for the nation's ideological shift. [Politico]
• Henry Louis Gates talks to James Watson and finds him to not be a racist but a "racialist"; Gates explores his own love-hate relationship with DNA; generally depressing story reveals James Watson has a low IQ. [TheRoot]

MOE: Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how?
MEGAN: I can make mimosas, but I was sort of planning on doing laundry later.
MOE: Shall we talk about the Reverend Wright?
MEGAN: Well, everyone else is, including Reverend Wright.
MOE: Or the economy? The food crisis. Stop hoarding food, world! It is only getting more expensive because you think it is going to get more expensive! It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, don't you see?
MEGAN: I don't think everyone is hoarding. God knows I'm not.
MEGAN: My fridge contains: butter, really old bread, prosciutto, eggs, beer and leftover pizza that I'm likely going to eat when we're done. And the afore-mentioned champagne but it turns out I don't actually have any OJ for mimosas, so it's just straight champagne for me.
MOE: How was your weekend? I went to a wedding. It was wonderful until I realized I had no place to go once it was over, save 30th Street Station, which was very cold and miserable. At least I had the money to purchase myself an Eagles sweatshirt to wad myself up inside on the way home. Warm clothes at cold train stations is a rarity. My fridge contains mustard and hummus.

MEGAN: Glamour sent me to cover the White House Correspondents Dinner and the various parties. I spent it in dresses and heels rather than the tank tops and flip flops that a 90 degree sunny weekend should have portended.
MOE: Oh we should really talk about our fabulous parties then, I suppose. The Mauritanians suffering at the hands of all the sudden hoarding from the food exporting nations — here is one area where the free market could be virtuous, and yet when called to be virtuous, I guess we cling to national allegiances and self-preservational instincts...and anyway so Craig Ferguson. Do share.
MEGAN: Craig Ferguson was deemed hard-to-understand due to the acoustics and his accent, but I was upstairs in the bar at that point so didn't catch a ton of it. It wasn't as bad as Rich Little or as evilly good as Colbert 2 years ago and then it started to rain.
MOE: Oh and here's a link re the new unflat world, the rise of nationalism. God I hated The World Is Flat. 2% of Mauritania's land is arable, I just learned.

MEGAN: I hated that book, too. I can't remember why, because I read it in grad school, but I remember hating it. I hate all those books. Don't get me started on Guns, Germs and Steel, fucking piece of social Darwinist bullshit
MEGAN: Axelrod was just on MSNBC. I don't think Wright's new speaking campaign is sitting too well with him.
MOE: Here's a YouTube clip from the event. At around 9:40 he says to GWB, "I remember eight years ago you promised you were going to restore dignity to the White House...pause...By the way I thought you were fantastic on 'Deal Or No Deal'." I don't think you can compare Guns, Germs and Steel to The World Is Flat but that's just maybe because I read Tom Friedman to feel smarter than him and I read Jared Diamond to familiarize myself with the deluxe version of the conventional wisdom he purveys.

MEGAN: Nothing like some delicious conventional wisdom that all peoples are made to be conflicted and the "best" society will win!
MOE: Reading about the development of penicillin...the drug's discoverer, Alexander Fleming, was sort of this absent minded dilettante who was moved by treating soldiers in WWI to try and isolate antibiotics, but the drug would have gone nowhere — it sat around on his shelves for 20 years — if not for a group of scientists at Oxford, some of whom were motivated partly by humanistic instincts but one of whom notably (I'm forgetting who) thought he was doing something very dangerous because plagues were necessary to keep the population under control, but he didn't care because the project was so intellectually tantalizing, and maybe he was right about all of that. Who knows. Shall we discuss Bill Clinton's Obama envy, brought to you by a certain notable ex-colleague of Spencer Ackerman?
MEGAN: Wait, so, plagues are the opiates of the masses?
MEGAN: Also, I know nothing about Spencer's ex-colleague whatsoever that I didn't read about in that piece he wrote about him (which sounded like typical interoffice backstabby nastiness on the colleague's part), but I now know he's not a fan of Bill Clinton. He's not supposed to be even-handed or something, is he?
MOE: Huh? Even handed? Oh lord don't give me that. My problem with this Talk Of The Town is that, being a Talk Of the Town, it doesn't really address annnnything beyond the perception of the perceptions and, you know, a lot of people would truly like to have an answer to: were the failings of Clinton economic policy fundamentally the result of a Giant Sellout, or well-meaning inevitabilitarianism?
MOE: Which is not a word.
MOE: Also, my sense was that Angela Davis may have been cool, but that Stalin was not, and now people think I am so terrible, and maybe they are right.
MEGAN: Oh, well, I just mean that it seemed very much like the author didn't like Bill Clinton from the get-go, which made me roll my eyes and not really take anything he was saying very seriously.

MEGAN: Stalin was very uncool. The problem with Communism was that its intellectual advocates were always sort of idealistic and understandable while its practitioners were always crazy, power-hungry oppressive megalomaniacs.
MEGAN: Um, by the way, what is the kind of goatee called when the dude shaves most of the front of the chin but leaves maybe an inch on the very, very bottom, on the curve? Because that's what Reverend Wright has apparently grown.
MOE: I should just point out that my bias is having grown up for some time with communism, and having the sense from a very young age that while it was not so bad to be poor, it was creepy to be brainwashed. And please send a picture.
MEGAN: Ok, I take it back, actually, it turns out he's always had it, I just never noticed it before because I've never seen his face quite this big and it's a little grey.
MOE: And here's something that will shock you: Republicans preside over periods of slower economic growth and widening income gaps than Democrats. Paul Krugman doesn't understand why exactly but thinks there could be something to that and come to think of it so do I!
MEGAN: Laffer curve! Laffer curve!
MEGAN: Like, all these tax cuts at some point stop generating additional productivity and just turn into tax cuts.

MEGAN: OMG, Reverend Wright just said "I served 6 years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
MEGAN: The room erupted.
MOE: Well the Laffer Curve is kind of whatever, I mean it's just a tool to illustrate the law of diminishing marginal returns, but I guess this new graph would suggest, "ha ha, actually no, fuck Laffer and Keynes and all that noise, Republicans are just more likely to get it wrong, the end." Which I like because I kind of hate the Laffer Curve, insofar as it makes something really fucking mind-numbingly complex look pretty and simple and Reaganite.
MOE: Oh shit! Did he read that about himself in the Tribune?

MEGAN: But it's fun to say. Also, it ties conservatives up in knots right now because the evidence suggests that we're on the bad side of the curve even as they advocate more tax cuts and the Laffer curve is like the tax cutter's Bible.
MOE: Also, Wikipedia points us to this interesting CBO paper on how tax cuts at this point are just in no way fucking worth it.
MEGAN: And that shit's more from more than 2 years ago.
MEGAN: "As I said to Barack Obama, if you get elected, on November 5th, I'll be coming after you because you'll be representing a government that grinds people under," says Rev. Wright.
MOE: And fucking check out this editorial from the always-populist Wall Street Journal.

So Federal Reserve officials are whispering to reporters that they will consider a "pause" after another interest-rate cut this week. Perhaps we should be more respectful, but this sounds like the alcoholic who tells his wife he'll quit drinking next weekend, after one more bender. What Chairman Ben Bernanke needs isn't a gradual withdrawal from easy money but membership in Central Bankers Anonymous.

The practical impact has been to send energy and food prices soaring. This is a direct tax on both the world's poor and America's middle class. Just when the U.S. economy needs a resilient consumer given the fall in housing prices, these price increases have eviscerated consumer pocketbooks. In its attempt to help Wall Street and the financial system, Fed policy is punishing average Americans. The public is frustrated and angry with these price increases, and it has a right to be. Inflation is the thief of the thrifty middle class.

MOE: So dude, honestly, tell me about the WHCD because the rest of the news is really depressing. It's like recession, no wait depression
MOE: rich financiers have been profiting under a reverse-Robin Hood system whereby the amount of capital underlying securities steadily decreased as the risk was moved to the public balance sheet, the dollar is going to keep sinking, the entire financial services industry is a laughingstock...we need a new Decameron, if you will.
MOE: Did you see Heidi and Spencer? Who appeared, despite rumors they would not.
MEGAN: I did not see Heidi and Spencer. Going made me realize that I'd been in D.C. too damn long because I was all like "Oooh, Carlos Gutierrez! Fran Thompson! Helen Thomas!" and then I geeked out and played spot-the-celeb with this guy after making him pose for the photo and I totally didn't recognize Ashlee Simpson though I caught Donatella.

MEGAN: And then, since Samantha Bee was at Glamour's table, I chatted with her (cutely pregnant, but still in heels and I commiserated that she had to attend but couldn't drink and she said she only came because she figured when she pushed out a second kid no one would think she was cool enough to invite again).
MEGAN: And I took the picture at the bottom of this blog post.
MEGAN: And Bush's speech: lame.
MOE: Who the fuck was pete wentz the guest of?

MEGAN: I dunno, but he DJ'd the Capitol File party, so maybe them?

• Puppies! [NYT]
  
• Unexplained national BlackBerry shutdown began at 3:30 p.m. I'd take it as a sign from God, but those fuckin' iPhones are still working. [WSJ]
  
• Obama officially pulled ahead of Clinton, delegate wise, even counting the "superdelegates," after winning in Maine. [CBS News]
  
• Oooooh, and look who's inevitable now!!! [NY Times]
  
• No really, DRUDGE EXCLUSIVE inevitable... [Drudge]
  
• And now that pretty much every state where The Nation is read has held a primary, it's pulling for Obama too. [CBS News]
  
• Paul Krugman finds something Nixonian about all this Obama love but fuck if he's going to tell you exactly what it is. [NYT]
  
• If China keeps up this stealing our military secrets thing maybe one day they will learn how to wage their own futile trillion dollar wars on oil-producing countries. But wait, who will they borrow money from to do all that? [Washington Post]

• Hey, did you know? Living in a roomy suburban single family home on a sizeable plot of land with a car and a lawn mower is actually a less environmentally-friendly lifestyle the kind you'd have if you moved into my apartment, took the subway to work and never even recycled. [New York Times]
• Chelsea dines with the 21-year-old superdelegate. [ABC News]
• The Game was sentenced to 60 days for pulling a gun on someone at a pickup basketball game. (Guy, what part of "just a game" don't you...) [LA Times]
• Thank the deities there is hope for scripted TV after all. [Wash Post]